Inside B Channel

So today was our regular Sunday afternoon B Channel meeting.
There were only a few of us there, and we discussed the next story that we’ll work on.
Andrew has some footage of the City of Victoria’s Official Community Plan open house, and I’m writing an article about this confusing process.

The public meeting we went to last month was a consultation to learn from the public how best to consult with the public on how to create a plan to implement a plan to do something with future planning.

From the City of Victoria’s website:
“What is an Official Community Plan?

Established under the authority of the Province of British Columbia’s Local Government Act, an Official Community Plan (OCP) is a city-wide plan. Taking a comprehensive and long-term perspective, the OCP is the principal policy document that Council uses to assist with decision-making regarding urban planning matters. Topics addressed in the OCP include, but are not limited to, land use; growth management; design of the built environment; protection of the natural environment; transportation and mobility; economic development; infrastructure; heritage, climate change; community development; and housing.
The current OCP was last updated in 1995.”

We’ll cover this story the same way that we did the Harm Reduction story. We’ll have some video, a supporting article, links to other media coverage of the OCP, links to relevant websites, and links to relevant articles from other areas.

Our B Channel research team is busy searching for these links, as the video editing team is editing footage from the last OCP public meeting, I’m working on an article that will hopefully help explain what the OCP process is, and I’ll also be coding the webpage when all this work is ready.

At the same time we’re working on a homepage. The page that comes up now when you go to B Channel News is actually just an article page. When we have the OCP story ready, the front page will have video and a bit of text for those two stories, plus some links to local media and blogs, and a few other surprise elements that we’re working on.

I’m also busy writing a call-out for new members of the B Channel Collective, and that should likely be ready to be sent out in the next couple days. The OCP story should be ready in about a week.

We’re hoping as well that something might come up that we can cover and get a page built up around during this week so that we can have three articles up.

So B Channel is up, but basically only as a pilot page, to show potential collective members what we hope to do. The site will be built up around that first article, and we’ll work ourselves up to full running speed within the next two months. Then what we’ll hopefully have is one or two video pages (the 3 to 7 video clips, supporting article, links, etc) per week, with new text-only articles every day or every couple of days. We’d like to have some kind of content up daily to keep people coming back.

Tomorrow we’re starting our daily coffee meet-up. That will likely happen every morning at 7:30-9:30 at Cornerstone Cafe. We’ll be brainstorming ideas for the site, and for stories that we want to cover, as well as reading the newspapers, visiting news sites, blogs, etc and staying on top of what is going on. Not all of us will be there every morning, but if core collective members (which might be called the ‘editorial collective’) show up 2 to 4 times a week, there will likely always be an editorial collective member there to meet other members and new members.

So that’s how things are working. I’m super excited about the process. For a volunteer run effort, people are willing to put a lot of time into creating this project. Even writing the call-out has been an interesting project, as we work our way through the language required to describe just what it is we are attempting to do. We know we want to do something different; take media to a whole other level. We don’t want to be just another ‘alternative’ media source. We want to be part of creating a new model for mainstream media. (albeit one that will likely reflect the progressive politics of those involved.)

We are dedicated to the idea of providing as much info as possible. We are not interested in producing propaganda. We want to cover issues and events so that people become well-informed and can draw their own conclusions. We want to be inclusive, so that talented people with a passion for news media join our team in order to have the creative control that they can never get working for corporate media.

We have not figured out how to make money off this yet. That will come later. Right now there is a lot we can do on a low budget, and besides, even the corporate media is struggling to find ways to make money doing this. We think that if we can create a quality product, that eventually we’ll figure out a way to pay ourselves. We’ve actually got a few ideas that we’ll be floating soon. (Stay tuned).